Dr Virginia Madsen 

is a Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Media, Faculty of Arts, Macquarie University. She was a member and Board Member of the Faculty of Arts Research Centre for Media History (CMH), a former Director of CMH (2017-2020) and Deputy Director, CMH until 2025. She has a Doctorate from UTS, Sydney, a Post Grad Diploma of Arts (French), University of Sydney, and a Bachelor of Media & Communications from UTS. She was awarded a prestigious Vice Chancellor's Post Doctoral Research Fellowship at the University of NSW, one of 6 awarded (2002-2004), after completing her PhD in 2001. She was based in the Dept. of Media mentored by Prof Philip Bell, Head of Department, and produced two 55 min audio documentaries for the ABC (one shortlisted for documentary award, Third Coast International Audio Festival 2008), and numerous other publications. Prior to working in academia, Madsen has had a productive career in broadcasting as a producer-director and journalist with ABC's ideas and culture network, Radio National. Here, among other roles and programs, she created for the weekly arts flagship program, The Listening Room (broadcast nationally, ABC RN and ABC FM). She produced dramas, features, documentaries, audio arts works and collaborated on themed shows with fellow arts producers and directors. She wrote radio plays and radiophonic essays, and interviewed leading artists, thinkers and figures in the media and cultural, creative industries. She co-produced large media event works, and series. She has also written, directed or produced sound designs (theatre, museum exhibitions, documentary film), and related creative works performed for or installed at a range of institutions, broadcasters and arts companies. She has won awards and recognition for her audio documentaries, performance works and features, with a number of prominent works commissioned and/or adapted for broadcast, web and podcast (Germany, ARD; Radio France; Danmarks Radio, Croatian Public Radio). Her work was acquired as part of an international collection of radio art works by the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France.

Madsen's research interests span the history and development of audio media, public service broadcasting in radio and audio media, and its documentary forms, traditions and developments. She has significant expertise in sound design, radio and audio media practices and production in all aspects, including theory and history. Interdisciplinary foci include auditory and sound culture studies; new sound media, radio history and podcast studies; the audio and radio arts; locative and interactive sound media and immersive audio design and application; documentary in film and radio; transnational media history with expertise on radio and audio media, documentary and film arts; recording technologies and history, voice and performance and sound field recording and ecology. She has written extensively within these interdisciplinary fields, drawing on film documentary for example to explore parallel radio documentary and arts forms and developments. Her archival research includes work in British, French, Danish, Canadian, American, Italian, and German radio and public media archives and national repositories. 

She also supervises higher degree research students in all the above fields, and her specialisations include creative practice, story and narrative in fiction and nonfiction, new forms of landscape and locative audio documentary and sound walks works for smart phone and web. She is experienced and passionate about non traditional and practice-led projects as a PhD Supervisor. Her most recent PhD graduate, Dr Hamish Sewell, was given the Vice Chancellor's commendation for Excellence (2025).

Currently she has two major research and book projects underway: a history of the Australian public broadcaster's ‘ideas network’, ABC Radio National, including an oral history component of this project, originally funded by an ARC Discovery grant. Madsen began this extended study and then lead the project: 'Cultural Conversations: A History of ABC Radio National' (2014-2020) which has produced multiple publications from the team, and an oral history archive is continuing as an ongoing project she hopes to complete by 2027. She collaborated with Chief Investigators Profs. Bridget Griffen-Foley and John Potts (both at Macquarie University).

Madsen is also writing an international account of the 'documentary imagination' in audio media from the 1920s to the present, broadcast to podcast and beyond as the audio media boom expands its reach crossing with and into other media and platforms. This project charts transnational documentary and 'feature' traditions and the varied forms which have evolved across a number of sites and broadcasters from the UK to France, Germany, Denmark/Scandinavia, the USA, Canada and Australia.

Madsen's most recent creative practice project was conducted and completed with Hamish Sewell: Portland, the Town that Built Sydney. This is a 'soundtrail' and landscape documentary with custom App activated and responsive to GPS, for on location walking using smartphone and the Soundtrails App, or accessible via the web: https://soundtrails.com.au/portland-nsw/

Madsen has taught students at all levels, designing, convening and lecturing in units across media studies (including Australian Media; and Representation), documentary, radio, sound design, podcasting and audio media, media and digital production, and journalism offerings within her School and Discipline. She currently convenes two units at Masters level (Masters of Creative Industries) and a third year unit in the Bachelor of Media and Communications, also offered in the Bachelor of Marketing and Media. She was former lead of the Radio, Podcasting and Audio Media major and the Radio and Podcast area within the Media and Creative Industries fields commencing from 2008. She has previously also taught at UTS, and given guest lectures and talks to many other university courses.